Protest Against Dictatorship and the Construction of Collective Identity

Abstract

Protest against Dictatorship that started on April 3, 2017 in towns and cities across Serbia was too short-lived to establish organized production and instruments of distribution of meaning. This however doesn't imply that certain processes were not set in motion and that collective identity wasn't 'under construction'. The main aim of this paper is to reconstruct the identification patterns at work in Protest against Dictatorship. The study is based on data collected between 13 April and 4 May 2017 among participants of the protest in three cities in Serbia - Belgrade, Nis and Subotica (n=175). Two presuppositions - that collective identity is the field of struggle, and that identity building processes in contemporary social movements are influenced by a constitution and principles of the capitalist mode of production of social life - provided a basis for our analysis. We opt for an approach that conceives the collective identity as a product ("content") and process "contestation"). To conceptualize and operationalize collective identity we rely on the existing studies that outline four elements of collective identity that can be measured: worldviews, shared goals, relational aspects, and behaviors and norms. The contenstation is captured considering the extent of agreement and disagreement among protesters around each of these four elements.